Easter EggDLTK's Crafts for Kids
Natural Dyes for Easter Eggs

After 3 or 4 years of "normal" Easter egg dying, our family decided to try something different (I'll admit we still used the store bought dye as well).  But, to extend the experience we decided to pretend to be pioneers and use natural dyes for our eggs.

NOTE:  We tend not to eat our natural dyed eggs.  We've found they sometimes take on a bit of the flavor of what we died them with... cherry and onion flavored eggs are a bit icky.

The most foolproof natural dye, I've found so far is Tumeric (pictured above).
 

Instructions:

Natural Dyes you might try:

Here are some that we've tried, but feel free to experiment!  We've had success mixing and matching materials (like cherries and onion skins) to make different shades.

Red/Pink:  Fresh beets, canned cherries or frozen, crushed cranberries (not cranberry sauce or jelly)

Orange:  yellow onion skins

Light Yellow:  lemon peels, orange peels or ground cumin

Golden yellow:  Ground Tumeric (a kind of spice)

Light  Spinach

Blue:  Red cabbage leaves or blueberries (crushed) 

       - Pre-boil red cabbage leaves for 30 minutes.

Purple:  Grape juice (Welches)

Other Thoughts:

We haven't tried these yet, but the following suggestions have been made to us by viewers.

Beige  Strong coffee

??:  Red Onion (Spanish Onion) skins

Red or Purple:  Wild Raspberries

Blue:  Blueberries

 

Printable version of these instructions